Dead Reckoning (2 page)

Hassard's chains rattled as he squirmed to a sitting position. “Carrol Moncrief, the fightin' parson? He's your brother?”

“Full blood.”

“Well, I'll be damned. Wasn't he in on some big fight this spring?”

“He shot a couple of hard cases who tried to steal some horses from a camp meetin' he was preachin' outside of Pueblo. Just winged 'em.”

Hassard chuckled. “Don't sound like he's settled down much to me.”

“Oh, he's changed. Before he got religion, he'd just as soon kill you as look at you, and he'd do about anything for a dollar. He was a sight worse than you, Hassard. You said yourself you never hurt nobody in your life. Carrol's done worse than hurt folks. That's why I say you can mend your ways. If Carrol Moncrief did, you can, too.”

Hassard shrugged and lay back down on his side. “What's he doin' with hisself these days?”

Moncrief slipped the bit from a mule's mouth and let the beast wander off to graze. “He rides a circuit all through the territory. Preaches at weddings and funerals and camp meetings. Picks up a dollar here, dollar there. Got a letter from him last week. Said he hired on to guide some bunch of religious fanatics from Clear Creek over to the Western slopes.”

“Religious fanatics?”

“Yeah, the Church of the Weeping Virgin, or some such name as that. From the states. They want to build their own town out in the wilderness. Be lucky if the Indians don't slaughter 'em all. Anyway, Carrol is supposed to meet 'em on Clear Creek and guide 'em over the mountains.”

Hassard lay on his side in silence. He could just see the fighting parson taking a band of fanatics over the divide. Odd things happened out here. That's why this was such fertile ground. People here would fall for things like diamonds lying around on the ground in South Park. “Hey, Sheriff,” he said suddenly. “You gonna let me loose so I can accomplish my toilet?”

The lawman dropped the wagon tongue and reached into his coat pocket for the keys. “Never heard it said that way.”

“You have to learn to talk like that if you want to bamboozle those rich Easterners. You'd never know it to look at me now, but I can clean up like the starchiest dandy you ever seen,” Hassard claimed.

Moncrief unlocked the cuffs. “Get out,” he ordered. He looked the swindler over as he watched him rub his wrists and climb out of the wagon bed. The reddish-blond stubble on the man's face, the tattered wool suit, and the moth-eaten hat made it difficult indeed to see him as an Eastern dude. “Hold your hands out,” he said.

Hassard put his wrists together in front of him and let Moncrief fasten the cuffs again. “I'll only be a couple of minutes, then I'll help you set up camp.”

“I'll do it myself. You'll stay cuffed to the wagon.”

Hassard shrugged and turned toward the river. He ambled toward a patch of cattails downstream and downwind, the chain straightening between his ankles with every stride. He followed a narrow path into the cattails, the obvious latrine location for the campsite. He knew it well. He had memorized every step of this trail before he ever set foot in Fairplay. The South Park Diamond Field scam really was the slickest piece of work Dee Hassard had ever pulled off, and it wasn't over yet.

He found the rock he had planted there before and stopped beside it. He looked back toward the wagon, saw Moncrief watching him over the back of the second mule. He unbuttoned his pants, letting them drop to his ankles. He squatted, and Deputy Frank Moncrief disappeared behind the veil of cattails.

The stone between his feet rolled over easily, revealing the bundle of oilcloth pressed into the soft ground. He picked it up, trying to keep the cuffs from rattling as he pulled back the folds, revealing the .36-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. A few specks of rust had appeared on the blue gunmetal, but otherwise the pistol seemed no worse for the wait.

When Hassard came out of the cattails, Frank Moncrief was throwing firewood out of the wagon bed. The lawman had stopped to gather the wood in the timber on one of the high rolls. “You want to sit on the seat, or on the ground?” the sheriff asked.

“The ground, I guess,” Hassard said, approaching. He saw the deputy reach into his pocket for the keys. “You'll never guess what I found over there,” he said.

“A diamond?” Moncrief answered.

“Somethin' more valuable than that.” Hassard reached into his coat and put his hand on the revolver stuck in his waistband. He saw the key drop from Moncrief's hand. He pulled the weapon out, grasping it in both hands.

Moncrief froze with his hand on his sidearm. He heard the wind moaning among the wheel spokes. That hawk screamed down on him again. “You're makin' a mistake, Hassard,” he said.

The confidence man showed his straight white teeth and chuckled. “Take off your gun belt and throw it over here.”

“No.” He saw his mistake now. He had stopped to camp at a recognized campground. He should have chosen some random site.

“I'll kill you if you don't.”

“You're liable to try killin' me if I do, but you better think hard about it. That gun's been out there in the cattails a while from the looks of it. It might misfire.”

“It might. You a gamblin' man?”

“If it shoots, you think one shot from a thirty-six cal will kill me?”

Hassard's eyes twinkled. “It's been known to happen.”

“All right, say it does happen. Say you kill me. You'll just make things worse. You're not a murderer, Hassard, you're just a two-bit confidence artist.”

Hassard sighed. “I think I better clear somethin' up with you, Moncrief. You remember before, when I said I had never hurt nobody in my life?”

“I remember.”

“I lied.” He tightened his finger on the trigger.

The mules leaped when the pistol fired, one of them almost throwing itself down, its front legs hobbled together as they were. Moncrief fell back against the wagon and slumped to the ground, blood gushing from his head wound.

Hassard cocked the pistol and watched. The lawman kept breathing for a couple of minutes, but Hassard just waited. Another shot might alert somebody, he thought. Probably not, but it didn't hurt to be careful. When he was sure Moncrief was dead, he put the pistol in the wagon bed and reached into the lawman's pocket for the keys.

The gun belt was hard to drag out from under the dead weight of the body, and when he strapped it on, he found that it needed a new hole for the buckle, his waist being much thinner than Moncrief's. He fished a pocketknife from Moncrief's pants and sat down to bore the new hole.

He looked at the dead body and shook his head. “It's a wonder what some people won't fall for,” he said.

Two

Sister Petra knelt at the altar of the tiny adobe chapel, her fingers moving methodically from one rosary bead to the next. She whispered the prayers unconsciously, her eyelids quivering. Her neck ached from bowing to the crucifix on the rude wall. Her knees throbbed with pain, even on the goose-down pillow she had brought from her room. But she felt little of this world, heard her own whispers only as an echo of something far distant.

Suddenly she fell still and silent, no one watching her, no world existing for her beyond the adobe walls. “Amen,” she said, her voice snapping the trance. She had prayed alone, from dawn to dusk, for nine straight days. Now it was in the hands of God.

The sun had fallen behind the Sangre de Cristos, and light had grown dim in the chapel. Sister Petra opened her eyes and stared at the gray shadows. After nine days, her mind had become as a clock, able to sense sundown as if she had watched it happen.

She pushed herself up from the altar, rubbing her sore knees. Hunger growled in her stomach, and she smiled. She hadn't felt this carefree in weeks. Now the answer would come. If the village of Guajolote died and blew away with the dust, it was God's will.

The Ojo de los Brazos land grant had been acquired by American land speculators in Santa Fe. Guajolote and almost forty-five hundred acres surrounding it were for sale. The sage plains where the villagers grazed their herds and flocks: for sale. The mountain slopes where they hunted and gathered wood: for sale. The beautiful springs in the foothills, pouring twin arms into the Mora River: all for sale. Even the earthen homes of the villagers were for sale, and Sister Petra had learned that a prospective buyer was on his way from the states to view the grant.

“How can they do that?” José Villareal had demanded of her. “You are an Anglo. You know what they are doing.” He was the village alcalde, and the news had quite understandably enraged him.

“But I don't know,” Sister Petra had answered. “I don't understand it any more than you do.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I will go to Santa Fe and find out.”

So she had gone. She had found the speculator, an immaculate little American lawyer called Lefty Harless whose office stood near the Palace of the Governors.

“It's very simple, Sister,” Harless had said matter-of-factly. “The county taxes were delinquent on the Ojo de los Brazos grant. I paid the taxes, thereby acquiring the land.”

“But we've been paying the taxes regularly,” Petra argued. “There must have been a mistake in the records.”

“No mistake. The taxes went up in your county. You didn't pay at the new level.”

“No one told us,” she complained.

The lawyer shrugged. “It was published in the newspapers.”

Petra gasped in frustration. “Mr. Harless, we are a remote village. Few of our people even read. We hardly ever see a newspaper.”

“That's very unfortunate.”

“How did you, in Santa Fe, manage to find out that our taxes were delinquent before we did in our own county?”

Harless picked at something between his teeth with his thumbnail. “I have friends in the county government up there.”

Petra fumed. “I can see that you do.” She pursed her lips and glared at the little cheat. “We'll pay you back. What did the tax increase amount to?”

Harless spread a smug smile across his face. “The taxes have gone back down to their original level, but that's hardly the point, Sister. I own the land now, and I intend to sell it to the first buyer who will pay my price.”

“But what about the people?” Sister Petra snapped. “Do you think you've bought their souls? Have you sold your own?”

The speculator shifted his bloodshot eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“What about the homes of the people, their village, their lives?”

Harless answered coolly. “It's a free market. Buy the grant yourself if you're so concerned about the village.”

“How much?” she asked.

“A dollar twenty-five an acre.”

Sister Petra had squinted her bright green eyes at the speculator. “But that's over five thousand dollars!”

“Fifty-six even,” he had said.

That number had burdened her like a cross on the long walk around the mountains back to Guajolote. Fifty-six even! He had said it so casually, as if it were nothing! But by the time she returned to Guajolote, she knew what she would do. It was all very simple. Give it over to God. She would devote nine days of prayer to the matter—a novena.

And now the final day of her novena had passed, and she was free of the responsibility she had taken on for the village and its people. She picked up her pillow, walked to the door, looked down on the adobes perched along the bank of the generous Mora.

A rooster strutted in front of her. She lunged at it suddenly, hissing and waving her pillow. She laughed as the bird went cackling down the street.

The dry summer evening caressed her as she walked through the village, arching the stiffness from her back. It was a blessing to live here; one she too seldom gave thanks for. She would have to remember to thank God first thing tomorrow, but right now she was all prayed out. Kentucky would be in a muggy nighttime swelter, she mused. Dusk in New Mexico was Sister Petra's heaven.

She missed Kentucky sometimes: the greenery, the long cadence of rainfall on the shake roof, the lush aromas of moldering timber. But never did she regret leaving. Her purpose was here.

She had lived in Guajolote five years now, and was loved by everyone—even that old politician José Villareal, who resented the people seeking the advice of Sister Petra above his.

She had done everything she knew to save the village from the speculators. If the grant sold, and the villagers lost their homes, it would be the will of God.

She had started her first day of prayer asking only that the will of God be done. But now she realized, as she followed the frightened rooster down into the village, that she had asked for something very different on this ninth day of prayer. It was just a vague recollection now, in this world of earthly toil, but she had been praying all day for a number.

She didn't care to speak to anyone as she made her way through the village. She was too exhausted to even seek a greeting. She wanted only a meal and a long night's sleep.

“Is it nine days now, Sister?” the voice said.

She saw José Villareal sitting against the wall of his house. “Yes,” she said. “God is making up his mind what to do with your village now. I hope you will be ready.”

The alcalde chuckled. “Bless you, Sister Petra. I don't think all your praying will do any good, but I will remember that you tried.”

“Only good comes of prayer. It may not seem good to us, but we cannot see as much as God.”

“Go get some rest,” the alcalde said, waving her away. “You are not making any sense.”

She was starving when she reached her door. How long had it been since she ate well? How much sleep had she gotten over the past nine days? It had been fitful sleep, reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers in her dreams. What was that number she had prayed for all day? Her mind was numb. She couldn't remember.